Not-so-sweet surrender

Date: December 01 2012

The growth of masochism in popular novels has disturbing overtones, writes TANYA GOLD.

The final film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's series of teen vampire novels has already made its mark: worldwide, it reaped almost $US341 million ($325 million) at the box office on its first weekend, outstripping other Twilight instalments. The novels sold more than 100 million copies, and are considered so significant the Vatican, ever in search of devils, has attacked them - as it previously attacked the more benevolent Harry Potter novels.

But this is only partly a story about the power of marketing.

It is also about the swelling of female masochism in popular fiction. As with Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, which Meyer's novels inspired, Twilight is a loving-slave fantasy - Fifty Shades for teenage girls except with vampires, because teens are too young for shades of grey and prefer their disempowerment fantasies to look like fairytales.

Some women say Fifty Shades is a feminist novel in disguise, but this is nonsense: if so, why doesn't the heroine, Anastasia Steele, like so many masochists, switch and give billionaire sadist Christian Grey a kick in his cable-knit jumper? I was momentarily happy to see women reading explicit pornography on public transport but then realised it was S&M - he S, she M. Why would it be anything else?

Twilight is equally reductive. Bella Swan falls in love with vampire Edward Cullen, who is very rich - if you aren't rich in trashy teen fiction, you're not worth loving: Stephenie Meyer is not Thomas Hardy. (The more wholesome suitor, who is a werewolf, has no money at all; he is in essence a trailer-park mythical creature from the wrong side of Grimm.) Work is an irrelevance for Bella, as this is princess fiction, too.

She is rescued from a buffet of terrible fates, including a nest of Italian vampires who look like fashion designers. Whole tracts of the movie scripts consist of repetitions of the line, ''Bella has got to be safe!'' - which is not only offensive but also incredibly boring. But the most terrible fate is already with her: she cooks, she cleans (she is a sexually promising Famous Five heroine); she does not have sex with Edward before her marriage, because nice girls don't in abstinence porn - which, if Twilight has a genre, is surely the one. Finally - and if you hate a spoiler, I care not - she becomes a vampire.

Two of Twilight's themes are particularly disturbing. One is the sexual violence of the central relationship. A blog by anonymous LiveJournal user kar3ning detailed 15 signs of an abusive relationship, as named by the American National Domestic Violence Hotline, and found many of them in Twilight. Kar3ning was attacked online by angry fans, in the same way you might be attacked for suggesting the Mr Men books were racist, but kar3ning is right.

There is the controlling male, the female with low self-esteem, the threats of suicide and murder, and so on. The day after her wedding night, Bella examines the bruises on her body with something like aroused awe: ''There was a faint shadow across one of my cheekbones, and my lips were a little swollen … the rest of me was decorated with patches of blue and purple.''

The other is the anti-abortion agenda. Bella conceives a child on her wedding night. She resists all pleas to remove it: it breaks her ribs, her pelvis and her spine; then it kills her. All this is noble, because Bella is a good mother and dies for her child as a loving martyr to the weakness of her own body. (The star of the movies, Kristen Stewart, is also rather unlucky in real life. She was photographed kissing a married man and, because abstinence porn can bleed into life, she is now talked of as ''unbankable'', Hollywood's own death.)

Because Bella becomes a vampire and can, by the end, jump off cliffs and wrestle with mountain lions, it has been said Twilight is a story of female empowerment. Some women can convince themselves of anything. However, it is more likely that Bella surrendered her mortality for a murderous love and a private island. A kind of twilight, sure.

Guardian News & Media

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